By Alexander Baxevanis on 28 August 2009
Today is the official release day for “Snow Leopard (also known as Mac OS X 10.6), the next iteration of Apple’s operating system. There’s been little fanfare about this release - perhaps because it has few major new features, but many small “under the hood” improvements. However, I’ll be more than happy to fork out the £25 that Apple is charging for this upgrade, because I’ve always thought that user experience lies in the details.
Some of those “details” include:
- Space savings: Apple claim they’ve managed to trim Mac OS X by 7GB for an average installation - giving some breathing space to those who (like myself) are reaching the limits of a small laptop hard disk
- Easier to select and copy text from PDF files - if you’ve ever tried to copy text out of a PDF file only to find out that it comes jumbled up with parts of the text in the wrong order, you know what I mean.
- Larger file icons that can show a detailed preview of a file before you even open it
- Last but not least, a suite of improvements to the built-in accessibility features
People looking at a complete system can easily think that “it doesn’t do anything special” and “it’s easy to build this from scratch”. Benjamin Pollack has written about the design of Stack Overflow, an online community for developers:
… most visitors seem to agree that the user experience is smooth, from start to finish. They feel that they’re interacting with a polished product. Even if I didn’t know better, I would guess that very little of what actually makes StackOverflow a continuing success has to do with [the technical details] … There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable.
Fortunately, people are taking note. Ubuntu, the open-source Linux-based operating system, is an interesting example. We recently blogged about their One Hundred Paper Cuts project, aiming to find and fix 100 minor problems that degrade the overall user experience.
When was the last time you looked into the details of your product or service and tried to streamline things instead of focusing all your resources on building grand new features?
Photo credit: whybesubtle via Flickr / Creative commons
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By Trenton Moss on 27 August 2009
We published our latest report yesterday looking at the state of play within the online financial price comparison sector. The report, entitled Future comparisons: What’s next for price comparison websites, is now available for free download from this site. We decided to look at financial price comparison sites as this sector has been very visible so far this year, with all the major players doing extended advertising campaigns:
- Confused.com has been pushing themselves as offering a user-friendly process
- GoCompare has continued to push their (rather bizarre) 5* rating system
- MoneySupermaket has used Peter Jones to sell their wares
- uSwitch has lost the gospel choir and opted to push their new ‘uSwitch uSave uSmile’ strapline
- CompareTheMarket continues to push their CompareTheMeerkat offering (you have to check this out if you haven’t already seen it)
Despite these high profile advertising campaigns and the global recession, visitor numbers fell sharply in the early parts of this year. Due to this, and it being such an incredibly competitive industry, we thought we’d investigate the online financial price comparison sector.
Our report looks at past trends and how the comparison site market currently stands, as well as making robust recommendations for future developments. Trust, loyalty and user experience will be key to future success for all of these websites, with a particular need to focus on:
- Presentation of results
- Filter and sorting on the results page
- Retrieval of quotes
- Explaining how the site works
You can read all about this and more in the Future comparisons: What’s next for price comparison websites - download it today (it’s free!).
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By Danielle Lyon on 25 August 2009
Being the Office Manager at Webcredible, I’ve been surrounded with user experience professionals for over a year and a half now. Fed up with not being able to converse with any of my colleagues on the subject I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands!!
I recently read ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ by Donald Norman and ‘Don’t Make Me Think!’ by Steve Krug, both of these books have helped me to gain some basic understanding of user experience.
The first book I read was ‘The Design of Everyday Things’, and this really opened up my eyes to the importance of ease of use in design. By placing an emphasis on the things you use every day, it helped me relate to the ideas and concepts of user experience. The most interesting and perhaps crucial element I took away from reading the book was the idea of conceptual models, so simply matching the design model to that of the user’s model to create an easy to use design. The other significant thing the book highlights is that the designer is not the end user and should therefore design products and/or services with the user in mind.
The second book I read ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ is specific to web usability and really breaks it down for amateurs like me. The book in Steve Krug’s own words is a ‘common sense approach to web usability’ and focuses on helping you to understand your own web experiences. The book helped me to fully appreciate the role of our user experience consultants and whilst Krug does put an emphasis on common sense, like with many things it’s only obvious once someone has pointed it out to you.
‘The Design of Everyday Things’ and ‘Don’t Make Me Think’, although very different books have definitely given me a good understanding of user experience and I can now converse on a basic level with my colleagues. I am really lucky to have lots of passionate people around me who I can learn from and who knows I may even become a user experience guru in years to come!
Watch this space : )
Photo credit: Rocketraccoon via Flickr / Creative commons
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By Abid Warsi on 24 August 2009
A recent BBC News article discussed the slow uptake of mobile TV (Mobile TV ‘very slow’ to take off). We discussed mobile TV in our Screen Reality report where we discussed the convergence across the PC, TV and mobile phone.
As we predicted, live mobile TV has been slow to take off. Most people won’t plan their mobile TV watching according to broadcast TV schedules. The potential growth area we predicted for live TV seems to have been more successful. Watching live events such as sporting events or Michael Jackson’s memorial service is more common.
Mobile TV providers should consider the context in which consumers will use their services. With the exception of watching live events, consumers are more likely to watch content if they can start watching at a time that’s suitable to them, pause it and then pick up from where they left off at a later time.
If your interested in reading more about convergence have a read of our Screen Reality report.
Do you watch TV or video on your mobile phones? Tell us about your experiences.
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By Philip Webb on 19 August 2009
Our recent local council website usability report found that many local council websites still have a lot of room for improvement when it comes to usability. However, it seems that Google now wants to help local councils with their online offering with its Local government resource centre.
Offered in partnership with Directgov, LG Communications and the Society of IT Management (Socitm), Google’s resource centre offers a variety of online tools designed to help local government organisations to:
- Make their websites easier to find
- Improve the user journeys on their websites
- Improve efficiency and reduce website costs
- Build revenue through their websites
- Help local business use digital to their advantage
The resources on offer such as Google Analytics, Website Optimiser, AdWords and AdPlanner certainly have the potential to be useful to local councils, but the question is whether the decision makers will see the value in and also get over any fear of using such an abundance of web-based tools.
Time will tell, but one thing’s for sure - the opportunity to save money through the resources on offer, and the strategic partnerships Google has developed for this venture could just swing its widespread adoption in the local government sector.
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